Considering the deep financial hole that the US in, winding down Afghanistan is the first big area for savings.

I don’t know where you learned your economic history, but there was never a point in the American economy when manufacturing constituted a majority of the labor force – in the 30s about as many people worked in agriculture as in manufacturing.

If you define the “creative class” as “people in high-value added growth industries”, which seems to be the case, of course they’re not going to be fired during recessions to the same extent as people in “low-value addded declining industries”. That’s tautological, not insightful.

And what on Earth do you mean that countries outside the US have been “building and conserving their resources” to invest? China is not sitting on $2 trillion in reserves because they’re biding their time – they were already investing such vast amounts of money that their economy couldn’t absorb more. If you think Japan is biding its time for something better to come along, you’re crazy – that country is desperate for good ideas now. Who else is saving money? That’s just feel-good pablum that doesn’t reflect economic reality.

Leaving aside the bailout issue, the main item on the plate should be 1) removing the subsidies and protections to the present centralized corporate economy, and 2) removing the barriers to a successor system coalescing out of the rubble.

Under the heading of #1, that means especially eliminating transportation subsidies (funding the Interstate with weight-based tolls on trucks, funding civil aviation ENTIRELY from its own revenues and eliminating eminent domain power for building and expanding airports) that promote artificially large market area and firm size. It also means streamlining the tax code to eliminate special tax advantages for firms engaged in capital-intensive, high tech production and mergers and acquistion (e.g. the depreciation allowance, R&D credit, subsidies to technical education, the interest deduction for corporate debt, the exemption of stock swaps from capital gains, etc.).

Under #2, fall–especially–zoning and “safety” regulations that impose mandatory minimum overhead costs on microenterprise, and thus effectively criminalize low-overhead, small-batch production in the household and informal sectors using “spare cycles” of ordinary household capital goods most people already own. We need to elminate all the regulatory barriers to people running microbakeries with ordinary kitchen ovens, unlicensed cab services with a car and cell phone, etc. And we need to eliminate the barriers to providing liquidity for barter between such producers through LETS systems, organizing networked microcredit through mutual banks and crowdsourcing, etc. We also need to eliminate “intellectual property” as the main bulwark of many corporate walls against self-managed peer production by their own “human capital,” and as a legal barrier to modular design and generic replacement parts and other prerequisites of repair-and-recycling product design.

What we need is a paradigm shift in how we think of cities, of jobs, of finance, of government, and of transportation. We’ve let the 20th Century (and the first half of the 20th Century even) dictate to us for far too long.

Obama’s failing his first big test. His proclamation about “change” remains as vague today as it did when he was campaigning. And because of that, he’ll be viewed as Bush-lite if he doesn’t change course.

Maybe people should send Geithner and Summers the big red Bozo nose, since they’ve taken on the roles of corporate clowns.

With China being the cash behind United States’ “military adventures” and other funding, I wonder what their position and influence over US policy. It is in the best interest of China to keep Americans spend-happy buying Chinese products where they turnaround and lead the money they receive back to them.